China’s alleged efforts to hack into a trove of personal information about U.S. federal government employees seeking security clearances shows a brazen disregard for American sovereignty. It’s also precisely the kind of national security-focused cyberespionage that U.S. intelligence agencies engage in against other countries — and say is well within the bounds of modern spycraft, analysts tell POLITICO.

“To me, this is traditional national security espionage through different means,” said Matthew Rhoades, director of the Truman National Security Project’s Cyberspace and Security Program. “It’s the same thing the U.S. and the Soviets used to get into during the Cold War. Essentially, you’re just trying to find targets with access to highly classified national security systems and operations.”

The New York Times, which broke the story late Wednesday night, reported that the intrusion took place on computer systems belonging to the Office of Personnel Management. But there’s no evidence that the attackers actually accessed any personally identifiable information about employees before cyber defenders at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center shut them out, a DHS official told POLITICO on Thursday.

U.S. officials have drawn a firm distinction between traditional nation-state spying and the widespread looting of intellectual property and trade secrets for the benefit of private or state-owned corporations, which they accuse Beijing of.

“We don’t break into an economic competitor and take their business plans,” former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told POLITICO in a recent Q and A. “For the Chinese, that’s their primary focus.”

NSA programs revealed by leaker Edward Snowden last year represent legitimate national security spying, these officials say. Even alleged hacks aimed at sussing out the state of foreign economies are for the benefit of government decision-makers, not U.S. companies.

Charges the Justice Department leveled against five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army in May, by contrast, focused on actions the U.S. believes should be out of bounds — stealing U.S. companies’ trade secrets to pass along to their Chinese competitors.

“It doesn’t mean we’re going to be happy about this [OPM hack], but I do think we need to separate these two issues,” Rhoades said.

As a result, the new allegations are unlikely to shift U.S.-China cyber relations, which have been in deep freeze since the Justice Department indictments and China’s suspension of a bilateral Cyber Working Group hours later.

The Chinese attack on the OPM in March was apparently aimed at stealing personal data about tens of thousands of federal employees who had applied for top secret security clearances.

That information could be invaluable in orchestrating sophisticated spearphishing attacks against highly placed employees in the federal government with access to sensitive information, said Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It could also be used for conventional intelligence recruitment efforts.

The information would allow attackers to mimic emails from trusted co-workers, for example. But the hackers’ objective would likely be to worm their way into sensitive government computer systems, rather than to steal banking logins or credit card data.

Nonetheless, labor unions representing federal employees said they were concerned about the consequences for their members.

“Data security, particularly in an era of rising incidence of identity theft, is an increasingly important matter,” said Colleen M. Kelley, national president of federal employees union NTEU. “All federal employees have a right to expect that their personal and financial information will be protected and secure.”

Kelley said she would seek a briefing from OPM to get “further information about the breach and what steps are being taken to ensure the privacy of employee information.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei denied any state involvement in the hacking in a regular press conference Thursday.

“We keep stressing that China firmly opposes cyberhacking,” Hong said. “This is what we say and what we have been doing. Recently, some American media and Internet security firms keep playing the card of China Internet threat and smear China’s image. They cannot produce tenable evidence. Such reports and comments are irresponsible and are not worth refuting.”

It’s not clear whether the attack was launched by an independent group or by a group aligned with or working for the Chinese government, a Homeland Security source told The New York Times.

If the attack came from a non-government aligned group, the hackers likely hoped to sell the information to a national government, either the Chinese or perhaps the Russians or another nation, Rhoades said. That raises a larger question about the extent to which nations are responsible for hacking that happens on their territory that they may not be directing, he said.

“One of the major problems in cyber is plausible deniability,” Rhoades said. “States, especially Russia and sometimes China, say, ‘It might have come from our territory but not from a government network so there’s nothing we can do about it.’ It brings up the question of what types of things a sovereign nation is responsible for that happen in its territory.”

News of the OPM hacks broke just before Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew concluded a Strategic and Economic Dialogue with their counterparts in Beijing. In a press conference following the meetings, Kerry said he and Lew were notified of the alleged attack after meetings were concluded and just minutes before the press conference.

Kerry did press the Chinese on the larger issue of intellectual property theft during a closing joint statement, saying it had a chilling effect on innovation and investment and damaged both nations.

Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said his nation “hopes that the U.S. side would create conditions for the two sides to have dialogue and cooperation on the cyber issue,” but made no commitment to rejoining the Cyber Working Group, which had been one U.S. goal of the dialogue.

If the question of economic cyberespionage is on hold, Segal said, the big question is whether the two governments will be able to put that issue to the side and make progress on other cyber fronts.

“The rate of hacking doesn’t seem to be going down and there are more and more stories,” Segal said. “[But] the hope of the Cyber Working Group was to make progress on cyberconflict issues, attacks that would destroy things in a military context and trying to get the Chinese to agree to norms about how we use cyber in armed conflict.”